U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping after a visit to the Zhongnanhai Garden in Beijing on May 15.China Pool/Getty Images
A big strongman-led country claims that the smaller democracy next door ought to be part of its territory, for no legitimate reason. The nuclear-armed autocracy issues threats and masses arms on the border. But its ultimate decision is based on a calculation about how the rest of the world will respond – how much the smaller democracy is valued, how much the larger power stands to lose.
That describes Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in 2022. But it also describes the very similar calculations being made in Beijing today, about Taiwan, based on President Xi Jinping’s observations of what has occurred in Kyiv and Moscow, and also in Kabul, Caracas, Tehran and elsewhere.
Behind every military action, retreat, compromise, arms deal or peace agreement attempted or abandoned by the United States and its allies is a numerator or denominator in Beijing’s fractional mathematics of conquest.
And that equation has been tilting against the people of Taiwan in recent months, as President Donald Trump has sent a series of messages, explicitly through his words and implicitly through his military adventures, that suggest a Chinese absorption of Taiwan might be a negotiable issue.
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Mr. Trump’s abandonment of support for Ukraine, his military failure against Tehran, his dividing and threatening of NATO allies, his decisions to betray the people of Venezuela and Iran in favour of their illegitimate regimes – all these have suggested that he might abandon the island democracy if it serves his interests. On May 15, he said it explicitly: “I haven’t approved it yet, we are gonna see what happens,” he said of US$14-billion in arms the U.S. Congress voted to sell to Taiwan. “I’m holding that in abeyance and it depends on China. It’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly.”
The “negotiating chip” remark resonated in Beijing. In doing so, Mr. Trump “did not reduce the risk of conflict. He raised it,” wrote Ryan Hass, who served as Barack Obama’s National Security Council director for Taiwan, China and Mongolia.
“Trump’s public openness to negotiating with Beijing over America’s posture on Taiwan will serve as the diplomatic equivalent of a matador waving a red flag in front of a bull. It will cause Beijing to intensify its efforts to test the boundaries of what it can gain in terms of loosening America’s commitment to Taiwan’s security.”
Taiwan is arguably the most important country in the world, if China allowed it to be recognized as a country. Democracies and free societies are a fading brand, in large part due to Mr. Trump’s influence, and the people of emerging nations are tempted to view the stability of entrenched dictatorships as a more desirable option, their money and treaties more reliable. In contrast, there’s a highly visible alternative model in the vast economic and technological success of Taiwan emerging from its healthy, competitive and hotly defended democracy and robustly open civic life.
It’s in all our interests to keep that model alive, to show that places like Taiwan are worth defending, and their shift to democracy is not something the world’s powers will bargain away.
Mr. Xi has repeatedly shown that he does not believe the democratic world is really committed to its own defence.
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When the United States pulled its military out of Afghanistan in 2021, the response from Beijing was “Afghanistan today, Taiwan tomorrow,” as Chinese state media put it, sending the official message that “U.S. will abandon Taiwan in a crisis given its tarnished credibility. … Afghanistan is not the first place where the U.S. abandoned its allies, nor will it be the last.”
That triumphalism soon faded. After Ukrainians successfully prevented Russia from seizing their capital and taking control of their country, Beijing authorities were reportedly taken aback by the willingness of the Ukrainian population to lay down their lives, the lack of a pro-Russia faction, the speed and unity of Western support, and the failure of Russia’s large high-tech military to gain much ground. “On balance,” one academic analysis of Beijing’s posture concluded in 2023, “these lessons suggest that the costs of military action against Taiwan are greater than China may have anticipated before Russia’s invasion … [they] will likely induce greater caution in Beijing vis-à-vis the use of force to achieve unification.”
On some level, that lesson remains. Recent polls show that almost 60 per cent of Taiwan’s citizens would be willing to fight off a Chinese invasion without U.S. support “at all costs.” Much of China’s developing-world influence is based on it not being seen as an imperial aggressor like Russia or America. But Beijing must be balancing those realities against Mr. Trump’s eagerness to sell out the democratic island. Its continued freedom should be a condition of any deal with China.